artist's statement by laura cree

Old Maid: Librarian Edition

​Within Team Librarian’s data set, I found that despite the presence of many representations of popular librarian stereotypes (mostly women, several “old maids,” a few pictures depicting “shushing”), there was still a surprising level of diversity. Some participants drew male librarians, many drew young librarians. I was especially taken aback by the overwhelming number of librarians depicted positively. Out of 204 drawings, 134 of those depict librarians overtly smiling, while only 13 depict librarians with clearly angry expressions (others drew librarians with either neutral expressions, or no facial features at all). Often, individuals drew the librarian in an act of service, either addressing the viewer with a question such as “How may I help you?” or assisting other characters in the drawings. While the stereotypes of the old maid librarian, or the grump at the front desk, point to the notion that librarians are still commonly misunderstood, this data set also reveals that at the very least, these particular stereotypes may be slowly diminishing from public perception.

According to Radford and Radford (1997), the unpleasant and rigid librarian stereotype stems from the notion that “the ideal library is one that is never used or disrupted. Order becomes the end in itself” (p. 256), and that because of this, librarians do not want to help people, and thus are perceived negatively. Based on the data set, one can see that this influence still persists, but certainly not as strongly as it once did. The presence of librarians of different ages and genders, along with the service-oriented nature of the drawings, coincides with Marinelli’s (2000) view that we may now “be wrong about public perception of the field. Media images to the contrary, some studies have shown that patrons of library services view librarians positively” and that librarians who fall outside of these media images, such as male librarians in a college library, are viewed positively despite expecting to be viewed negatively. Our data set sheds light on what currently holds true: the public may not know exactly all that we do, but they do know that we are there for them.

In this spirit I have created a deck of cards for the classic game, Old Maid, entitled “Old Maid: Librarian Edition”, along with instructions for gameplay. To play this game, there is always one card that is the only one of its kind (called the “old maid”), unable to form a pair; the player with this card at the end of gameplay loses. In this deck, that one card features an actual participant’s drawing of the grumpy old maid stereotype, and the other fifty-two cards feature drawings chosen deliberately to represent the diversity in the data set—some male librarians, some female, some smiling, some neutral, some young, some older. I specifically chose the medium of a deck of cards because it furnishes the goal of displaying diversity in the data set, and it also represents how the grumpy old maid librarian is slowly disappearing from public perception (there being only one old maid card among fifty-two other different images). Creating a playable surface for these images enables the player to engage with them and confront them.

Artist’s note: Please do note that I would have liked to include librarians of colour for this to be a truly representative game, but no participant drew a librarian of colour. In this way, my deck not only shows different librarians, but it also highlights the problematic realization that according to public perception, librarians are white.